Disclaimer: The Chuck Norris fact generator thing was funny for about thirty seconds and that was 4 goddamn years ago. Since I am supercool and always on the cutting edge of internet humor, I have not only never told a Chuck Norris joke but I have also thought poorly of those who do.

However, removing ourselves from the disgusting fray of mainstream internet humor, we might be able to analyze Norris' image in some productive way. And, I mean, it's pretty interesting, when you think about it: for decades he was an unexceptional action star. He couldn’t act, his movies were terrible, and his voice was kinda creepy, but like I said he was just an unexceptional action star. Then Conan O'brien introduced the Walker, Texas Ranger lever, which when pulled would show a thirty second, hilariously out of context clip from Norris' seminal drama about rangering. The acting in these clips was horrible, the stories and fights were outrageous, and their morals were often surprisingly hamhanded and sanctimonious. To a novice viewer, this might have seemed like exceptionally bad television, but I had watched enough 90s cable to know that Walker wasn't even near the bottom of the barrel. Still, Conan's presentation was funny.

The bit took off. Chuck was all of sudden an emblem of the ridiculous, poor quality excess of mid 90s American television. That's the key—he was no longer an action hero. I don't know why he was chosen, or why Walker was picked on more than, say, Silk Stalkings or the Hercules show that had Kevin Sorbo in it. Norris isn't really charming or appealing, he's not magnetic at all and his looks, for a TV star, are unexceptional. He's garden variety, redneck prosaic, the kind of guy you'd see milling around the plumbing section at Menard's. And I think—this confused me for a while, but now I think that these traits were precisely why he took off. Because he was over the top in a mundane way, because there are hundreds of more ridiculous, more striking personalities out there who could just as easily become the unintentional emblems of bad TV, Norris' ascension to figurehead status had a sense of randomness to it. Its very mundanity makes it silly and nihilistic, and therefore worthwhile. It's what a PR rep might in have thought was "youthful" in 2005. It was internetty—sort of a G-rated version of 2 Girls 1 Cup.

The Chuck Norris Fact Generator was launched, and a whole generation of college students began repeating a handful of jokes about how Norris eats tomatoes made out of steel or how his blood had hair in it and tastes like a trucker's cum. The Generator played on Chuck's image as it had been adjusted by Conan's presentation. A Steven Segal or Jean-Claude VanDame generator wouldn't have worked nearly as well, since those guys weren't the universally recognized symbols of wackiness that Norris had become. I am honestly surprised that it took a few months after Conan started showing Walker clips before a website played off it because, really, this thing had INTERNET written all over it. Short clips, inexplicable humor, forced aimlessness—you could digest it, understand it, and share in within 30 seconds of your first exposure to it. The Generator allowed users to produce their own content, too, in the form of joke submissions. Its success was unsurprising, then, and so was the fact that it got unfunny and annoying really quickly. The fact that the "edgy" and "youthful" internet content lost its cred by being absorbed into the mainstream, in the form of a self-aware Mountain Dew commercial and countless sitcom references, is equally unsurprisingly. It's here, after the fad's fall, when the fad should have gone away, that things get really interesting.

What separates fads on the internet from those of traditional media is that internet fads linger. TV networks can stop showing Family Matters and General Mills can stop making Urkel-Os and then, bam, Urkel goes away forever (though his specter will continue to haunt our darkest dreams). Websites, on the other hand, don't get taken down. Something that you read about four years ago could wind up in your inbox this morning, forwarded to you by your grandma because she thinks it's just the hottest new thing. Something that in 2004 is too edgy, random, profane, violent, or uncomfortably youthful to be enjoyed by your Aunt Mable might, in 2009, seem pedestrian enough for her to enjoy. Internet Fads don't just lose their cred and edge after being absorbed into the mainstream, then; they also hang around and get adopted by older, squarer demographics. And, hey, since there's no bigger L7 on the planet than Mike Huckabee it makes perfect sense that Chuck became Huckabee's spokesman. That is, it makes sense in a postmodern, "nothing is real anymore" kind of way. It also made sense that the media rolled with it, what with Twitter and all. That Chuck eventually wound up being a conservative pundit and is now regarded as an elder statement of the new, paranoid, headless-chickenesque GOP also makes sense. I think. Since nothing makes sense any more.

Then, Chuck Norris wrote a blog for World Net Daily in which he says facetiously that he's going to run for President of Texas. "But Texas Doesn't Have a President!" Oh, not now it don't. But in a few months, when Obama's socialism really gets out of hand, thousands of right-wing domestic terror cells will overthrow our government and make Texas its own country.

I am dead fucking serious:

[quote]
When I appeared on Glenn Beck's radio show, he told me that someone had asked him, "Do you really believe that there is going to be trouble in the future?" And he answered, "If this country starts to spiral out of control and Mexico melts down or whatever, if it really starts to spiral out of control, before America allows a country to become a totalitarian country (which it would have under I think the Republicans as well in this situation; they were taking us to the same place, just slower), Americans won't stand for it. There will be parts of the country that will rise up." Then Glenn asked me and his listening audience, "And where's that going to come from?" He answered his own question, "Texas, it's going to come from Texas. Do you agree with that Chuck?" I replied, "Oh yeah!" Definitely.

[…]

For those losing hope, and others wanting to rekindle the patriotic fires of early America, I encourage you to join Fox News' Glenn Beck, me and millions of people across the country in the live telecast, "We Surround Them," on Friday afternoon Thousands of cell groups will be united around the country in solidarity over the concerns for our nation.
[/quote]

He ends with a quote from Sam Horton, saying that he and minions view themselves "on the eve of battle," and while he doesn't go right out and say he's looking to violently overthrow the legitimately elected government of US, it's pretty clearly implied.

Now, Chuck's an idiot. Obviously. And, as Stephen Colbert has pointed out, Glenn Beck is a paranoid moron . It's tempting to point out the brazen hypocrisy of right wing TV and media. After all, people like me were called traitors and cowards for acting upset when our government admitting to torturing people; these guys are calling for an armed revolt in response to a small rise of the highest marginal tax rate. You'd think that hoping for the collapse of the United States would be like the last thing a patriot would do. But, as with Norris' idiocy and Beck's insanity, I think this point is too obvious to warrant further discussion.

Norris is now a co-figurehead of an emergent movement I like to call Resistance Conservatism—a group of delusional talk radio and cable TV fans who honestly think that an armed revolt will soon be upon us. It might be a race war, it might be simple secession, or it might be, like Chuck says, a series of domestic terrorist attacks against the government. It's reflective of a bold new age in which conservatism is defined by the desire to shoot your fellow Americans until they are forced to adopt your ideals. It's insane. It's murderous. It lead to the Oklahoma City bombing and it will eventually lead to something else that's nearly as horrible. And the guy from Delta Force is its spokesperson.

What does this say? I've been trying to answer this question for two days, since I first read Chuck's essay, and it's been like attempting to solve a rubix cube while on acid: I start to find a pattern, develop a strategy, and man I'm really cooking, I got this one side all full up of yellows, but then I realize that I've playing with a doorknob, not a rubix cub, or else that the colors are moving themselves around, I'm not even touching them. I'm afraid. I know that much. The fact that as man genuinely, medically insane as Glenn Beck is allowed a forum on which he can spread his lunacy to millions of viewers is nothing short of terrifying. The fact that this is the new face of movement conservatism—that mainstream conservatives adhere to an ideology that is actually founded on lunacy… well, that's like kissing your sister, for me. I've always suspected this and I guess it's nice to be vindicated but, fuck, now that I know it's true I really wish it wasn't.

All I can say is that this is proof of the absolute victory postmodernism; you might have argued that we weren't completely in its grip back when our conception of reality was molded merely by print and television, but now that the internet has entered the fold I do not think it can be reasonably argued that anything is real, that god exists, that the world is a liveable place, or that the human race does not deserve to die out as quickly as possible. Thanks Chuck, for showing me the light.

The laundry room in my apartment building is down in the basement. The whole building is completely enclosed, meaning when you open my front door you enter a hallway, instead of the outdoors. This means that we don’t have one of those little fortified laundry compounds you see in some complexes, away from the living spaces, replete with magazines and a coke machine. Ours is right in the thick of things. A hollow wall separates the laundry room from a studio apartment, and since the apartment is cheap and this complex doesn't check credit ratings someone new moves into the place every couple of months. Usually it's black or Mexican people and they might play music loudly, but whatever. That doesn't bother me, doesn't impress me. It's not interesting. Sometimes, gloriously, the apartment is filled with whitetrash, and I get enjoy to a little insight into their marvelous world every time I need to clean a load of pajamas.

Right now, they are a couple. If they have children then the children are exceptionally quiet, and since whitetrash progeny rarely keep their lumpy mouths shut for more than 10 seconds straight I'm guessing it's just the two of them alone. They are young, probably, and so this studio apartment next to the laundry room is their love nest. I first became aware of them during the inauguration, just an hour or two after the swearing in, when the networks were replaying choice cuts from Obama's speech. Their TV was blasting. I could hear the distinct, wordless tenor of Obama's voice. Whenever there was a pause in the speech and the commentators began commentating, the woman of the couple yelled out "monkey!" or "fuckin' ape." I was hoping for more, but those were the only two, over and over. She didn't know any other word for primate.

Since then, I've taken to starting up my laundry very slowly, fumbling with the quarters, doing all the folding while still in the laundry room, stomping down the collected lint ball in the garbage can, whatever is necessary to soak up as much of their majesty as possible. Whitetrash have an affinity for the gerund form, I've noticed, (this often stressed in parodies of their speech, with "ifying" replacing the accepted "ing") and this couple is no exception. I once heard them discussing their admiration for a friend's calendaring—that is, her adeptness at filling in a calendar and keeping her schedules. I literally pressed my ear to the wall to make sure that "calendaring" was in fact the word they were using, and it was. I was happy about that for a week, and the couple usually gives me some such nugget of wonderment every time I bother to listen to them closely.

Today, the couple were shouting at each other much more loudly than usual. Goodie, I though. A feud! It started with the woman's gravely bark and moved onto the man responding pathetically and soft. When I first heard him speak I thought the might be a genuine, medically recognized retard, but I'm pretty sure he just has a severe case of the whitetrash mushmouth and I've since learned to properly listen to him and figure out what he's saying. The woman repeated her gravely yell, from far away but still loud, and the man responded. This time I was ready to hear him, and he said "on the floor." Then she said, clear as birdsong, "why the hell you think I'm gonna be looking for clean dishes on the floor! God you a fucking retard." The next part was garbled a bit, but more words were exchanged. There was a pause and I started loading the washer. Then the man said something and the woman, who I think was sitting right against the wall, said "nevermind." Man: "what?" Woman: "Nevermiiiiiiiiind!" It was hideous. If rats got some perverse joy while being strangled, that is how they would sound while being strangled. It was as if she was trying to pop a zit through sheer force of will.

What amazed me about this was how much it put me on edge. I was waiting for some rumble or crash. I know nothing about these people, really, but still assumed that violence was forthcoming. It didn't. Nothing happened. I finished my laundry and went back upstairs.

The feud would not leave me, as I made and ate a peanut butter sandwich, as I pet the cat, and as I tried to get back to reading my book, my arms were still tight and my toes were still curled. The woman, her groan, had made all of me clench with rage, the palpable and physical kind, the kind that you can actually, gratifyingly feel leaving your body in the same way vomit and semen leave your body. That's why I expected violence to come out. Because if I was her husband or her boyfriend I honestly think I would have hit her. I would have grabbed onto any chunk loose skin and tried to tear it off.

That's only fantasy. Roleplaying. I can't say for sure what I'd do if I was actually living with such a woman, a woman who could make such a noise. In the past, I've compared this woman’s voice to an outboard motor. It's thick, generally, and whenever she laughs or yells it has a cigarettey, trilling pulse to it. As she groaned she had used it like a motor (or a weedwacker, or anything else that is loud and dangerous), like some asshole revving his engine real loud to prove a point. She knew how hideous it sounded. That's why she made that noise. She wielded her own hideousness to win a petty argument. She broke relationship decorum in such a disgusting and violent way that any response in-kind, even physical violence, would have seemed justified. If the man had started beating her and she had started screaming I would not have called the cops or tried to help. I don't know what I would have done if I was in the man's place but if he had beaten her I wouldn't have told a soul.

This scares me. Like most men who don't beat their girlfriends, I feel an innate superiority to those who do. My character is stronger than theirs, I figured. I am just a better person. Beating your loved ones was something so foreign, so incomprehensible, that I considered its perpetrators subhuman, miles beneath me. Now I realize that I am no great saint—I have simply never dated a woman who has compelled me to hit her and therefore never faced the challenge of restraining myself. That sounds horrible, and I don't mean to suggest that all abused women (or most abused women, or even a sizable minority of them) do anything to reasonably provoke violence, that they deserve what's coming to them or whatever. But today I realized that sometimes it takes a great deal of self control to not hit some women, and while that doesn't excuse domestic violence, it makes it seem dangerously comprehensible and nearby.

Gird" has a few definitions, though effectively we kind of use them all at once. The first means to encircle with a strap, like how schoolchildren used to tie books together with belts (I think they did this, at least. I remember seeing an illustration for an old Homer Price book where Homer did this). This one we don't normally use except in its definitive sense, and no one outside of sailors and cattlemen really say it because who the hell else ties things up anymore. The more popular use of the term is combination of its other two official definitions: the first is a more general "to surround," in a physical sense, with the objective of fortification. It also means to prepare oneself for action.

I most often hear "gird" as part of the phrase "gird your loins," which when used correctly is both perfectly descriptive and creepily evocative. I can't hear the phrase, or type it, or even run it through my head without feeling my pelvis tighten. It's the same way I go through a sympathy tightness whenever I see a man on television getting racked in the groin with a wiffle bat. You probably do the same, if you're a man. You grimace and wave your hand above your crotch, even though it's not you getting hit and you're not feeling any pain or in danger of feeling any pain. You still gird yourself.

Gird sounds like a spoiled pronunciation of "guard," something a street urchin would say in an old novel. It is dirty sounding, in a way, like "cuss" and "terlet." Unlike "guard," gird is only an adjective, and only used in very specific circumstances. You can use it when you're describing physically putting something on top of something else, something precious, in order to protect it. Through doing this, you are preparing yourself for action. If someone tries hitting you in the crotch and misses, you are going to go after them. Likewise—and this is just me talking, me personally, explaining my solecism—I think gird should be used to describe that sympathetic sensation you get when watching other people protect themselves as a means of readying themselves for a response. When I tense up and feign protecting my genitals, I am girding myself. Even though I'm not really protecting myself and even though I'm not preparing myself for any response, I'm still girding myself.

There is a metaphorical girding, too. This is when you say "gird your loins" when something besides your loins is in danger. The reason we say "gird your loins" instead of "gird your bank account" or "gird your spot at the pool table" is because we can't picture ourselves wrapping something around these things in order to protect them, or else we can't see ourselves reflexively doing so. Our loins, we perfectly understand protecting. We understand groin danger so much that we react to it when we see it coming towards a stranger on TV. It's maybe the only situation we all understand well enough to react with such predictable and uniform sympathy. We don't jump out of the way when we see a train bearing down on someone on TV. We don't clutch our chests when a man gets shot, lower our jaws when a man gets punched, or hold our breath when a man jumps underwater. Wiffle bats are much more frightening than guns and fists, in this respect.

My suggestion is that "gird" be applied to any such fear that elicits similarly sympathetic responses as does getting hit in the balls. If something makes you groan and gesture not only when it happens to you but also when it happens to someone else, then that something makes you gird. If you hear about your friend puking from food poisoning and this causes you inhale sharply and loudly while pulling back your lips, you are girding. If the description of Viet Cong bamboo torture makes you stick your fingertips in your mouth and suck on them, then that description has made you gird.

This use of the word works perfectly. Gird is icky sounding but not quite profane; sound-wise, it perfectly matches the sensation of involuntary "girding," as I have described it. Plus, there doesn't exist any simple, usable term to describe this phenomenon. Neurologists and psychologists have some, but they're really lame. This works better.

This year, like the last year, contained a handful of interesting things that for personal and legal reasons I am refusing to list on facebook. In January, I began graduate school with a fairly light semester. I started to work as a writing tutor. Between that and assistantship money, I was suddenly flush. I could buy CDs again, and so I started listening to music again.

We drove to Milwaukee during the cold spring break and bought a bunch of beer. We also saw Belle and Sebastian and the New Pornographers, which was a wonderful show. The whole family was staying at Kathy's and when Me, Alex, and Andrew made it back from Milwaukee we were very tired and began to drink heavily. Kelsy came over with a friend and I think we badly offended them both, even though we didn't mean to.

Oh… jesus what the hell else happened? A bunch of other people's business. Stuff I can't talk about. I started writing regularly again, for the first time in a couple of years. It seemed like ideas were just bubbling out of me. I could sit down, any time, and crank out something that maybe wasn't great but was at least worth reading. I got three short pieces published during the summer. Zero since. Since then the writing has been less gimmicky and longer, hookless. Even if your writing has a gimmick it still needs a hook before it'll get published, something sparkly or feathery that gives off the wormy glow of profitability.

All I really remember of the summer was helping my parents move out of their big farm house and back to Clinton. They were moving into a much smaller house and so had to throw away a large amount of junk. Me, Mom, Zach, and Alex had one of the best nights ever filling up an entire industrial-sized dumpster with crap. The dumpster was huge, like the kind you see outside of government buildings that are being renovated. All night we kept laughing and joking and it was really wonderful.

Kelsy began the slow process of moving to LA in May, I think. She made a bunch of really long trips before just staying. She came back in June and we went to go see Neil Hamburger in Iowa City. He was very funny but the audience consisted only of me, Kelsy, and a couple of fat drunk guys who were probably gym teachers. They kept heckling him in a uniquely Iowan way that's hard to describe, but it was more or less like if all the things that go into fatness and whitetrashiness were boiled down into one man's chesty, drunken yelps. I looked over at Kelsy and saw a detachment, instead of a shame. It was then that I knew she was never coming back.

We went to Mulligans the night before my birthday and were all so hungover the next day we couldn't go to my scheduled party. The fall semester was the hardest ever, I think. I took three classes, all of them were very difficult, and I also tutored, wrote articles for the Newspaper, and worked as a research assistant. I took my assistantship and classroom duties a bit too seriously, I think, and what should have been my intro to grad studies seminar paper ended up being 60% or so of my thesis, which eventually was my first academic publication. Busy busy busy.

Election night was great. It seems odd to think, now, but the Democrats were only expected to gain 5-10 seats in the house and it were going to have to pitch a perfect game in order to reclaim the senate, which they did. I had a Tuesday night class and I literally was squirming in my seat all throughout its second half. I ran out to my car, turned on NPR, and was greeted with Robert Seigel's sweet voice reading off name after name of Republican senators who had been defeated. I stopped at the gas station where Nate worked and screamed out their names: "Sununu! Dead! Dewine! Dead! Allen! Dead! Santorum! Dead!" There were five or six customers in the store and I think I scared them pretty bad. (It's a damn shame that nothing got fixed. The bleeding was somewhat stanched but nothing got fixed).

I don't remember Christmas. For New Years me and Alex hung out with my parents and we all ate way, way too much.

I use the phrase cartoonish a lot, and I just realized that I usually use it mistakenly. Typically, I use cartoonish interchangeably with exaggerated or overblown. It's a derogatory term, as it should be, but this definition cuts out much of its potential depth. Cartoonish things are exaggerated, yes. But they belong to a special breed of exaggeration, one that increases the size of its subjects until they are distorted to the point of depthlessness or inefficacy. In spite of being larger-than-life magnifications, cartoonish versions of things are actually less detailed. They may cut to the quick of certain subjects, get rid of all superfluous and force readers or viewers to focus on the few aspects that actually deserve to be examined, but usually they don't. Usually, making something cartoonish means you're being reductive, getting rid of a lot of necessary complication and thereby cheapening your subject in some way or other. Even though cartoonish things are bigger, then, they are actually much smaller.

This is problematic, since cartoons are much more easily digested and retained than the real-life things they're meant to represent. This is why children love them so much, why a kid who would never dream of watching an objectively boring live-action show, like "House," would gladly watch an objectively boring cartoon show, like "Jabber Jaw." Things are overblown in just the right way so that all the pretense, complication, and multidimensionality of the show's subject matter are eviscerated. This has spread throughout every aspect of our culture, popular and otherwise. An utter lack of nuance is all we've been exposed to, it's how we think the world actually operates, and it has generated a nation of people who have no idea how anything works or ever has worked.

Live-action movies and shows, especially those about important subjects, are often actually cartoons. We still act like they're real-life, since they're live-action, but really they're just as cartoonish as "The Hair Bear Bunch." Example: Saving Private Ryan, an unmitigated pile of warmongering shit that won the praise of critics and audiences alike. While purportedly a realistic examination of the gritty horrors of war, the movie is actually a live-action cartoon. It's technically impressive, yes, well filmed and edited and wonderfully scored with great special effects, but all this does it make it an exceptionally well-made cartoon. The characters are as flat and unrealistic, though much less interesting, than the ones who appeared on the 80's "GI Joe" show. There's a handsome cowboy sniper who prays before he shoots people (and that's not complication, that's a sideshow; if that character is deep than Skeletor is deep for occasionally sympathizing with He-Man), a grizzled, numb sergeant who was Just a Normal Guy until all this madness happened, a mustached Italian kid who talks about pizza and his mother, and an intellectual sissyboy who's too busy reading books and sucking dick to know how to properly ice a Gerry.

The only thing more one-dimensional than the film's characters is its moral compass. The war is morally unilateral: only one side suffered, only one side was in any way justified. For instance, when Americans die it is brutal and painful. Their screams of pain are so righteous and realistic that even the FCC refuses to censor them for network broadcast. They are mutilated, bifurcated, eviscerated, squashed, and torn apart. They watch bits of themselves, bits the audience can see, flying away. They scream in agony while all of this happens. The Germans, on the other hand, fall over like characters on the old "Banana Splits" show. They occasionally let out a Wilhelm scream, but that's about it.

Its "shades of gray" are really just stark blacks against bright whites, like the rest of the film, only with a blur filter applied. For example, there's a scene near the end where the pussy intellectual guy (who's been dragging down the whole mission, what with his books and all) sits there and watches one of his comrades fight toe-to-toe with a Gerry. The German, who looks frightening, pornographically pale and European like one of the bad guys in Die Heard, eventually wins the fight. He slowly drives a dagger into the American's chest.. The American makes horrible gurgling noises. The pussy guy just sits there refusing to do anything and the German walks right past him on the way out.

Later, after the battle's been won and Private Ryan has been saved, the pussy guy lines up a bunch of captured Germans. One of them is the guy who daggered the American. The pussy guy shoots him and the audience laughs righteously. What would have been a horrible, inexcusable act of cruelty had the German-American roles been reversed was turned into a scene of sick comic relief. This was the film's attempt at moral complication.

The result of the film's success has been the cartoonification of World War II. Any discussions of the war's moral ambiguity, which were sparse even before the film's release, have now been abandoned. Kids today might not know who the Nazis were, or even what country they came from, but by golly they know they were bad. Tons of WWII-themed video games have been produced, because by golly the movie made those battles look so realistic and cool.

There's nothing I can do to stop this, but I can register my disgust at the fact that this movie has been canonized so quickly (especially when Malick's masterful _The Thin Red Line_ , which was released the same year, has been all but forgotten). The film is shown in history and film classes. We have validated it, and therefore validated its sick and broken message, by showing in our film and history classes. Don't get me wrong: it's a well made movie and it'd be perfectly fine if we were showing it as an example of war media or whatever, but we're not. We're treating it as an accurate, morally nuanced portrait of the Second World War. And it's not. It's just a cartoon.

After not hesitating to funnel nearly a trillion dollars to the financial sector with absolutely no oversight, management, nor even suggestion as to how it might be spent, congressional Republicans are suddenly remembering that being conservative is supposed to entail occasionally, well, being conservative. Or, it doesn't, actually—the last president was the most fiscally reckless in history, and we went eight whole years without hearing so much as a peep from the congressional Republicans about Bush's budgets. But the political landscape has changed. There's a Democrat in the White House. It's time to be obstructionist.

This has been a hugely complicated and disheartening 3 weeks. What looked like a surefire success has been killed. What looked like the first good, large project the government had undertaken in my lifetime, what looked like it might actually save the economy and wipe out much of the damage of the last eight years in one fell swoop has been executed, Frankensteined, turned into a murderous, undead parody of its living self.


Here's a basic rundown of what I think was going through Obama's head when he and his team began drafting the stimulus:

[Quote]
We need to pass a stimulus bill. Like, right now. We needed it last year. You know all those social and infrastructural programs that the last president slashed to pieces? Yeah, it turns out that the country needs those to function. We need to pour money into them, to make up for lost time. Yes, the Republicans will call this socialist. They think giving pocket change to the Salvation Army is socialism. But, come on, I mean they just gave a trillion dollars to the banking industry. They couldn't possibly pull out the socialism card right now, could they?

But, hey, let's be nice. Let's compromise. Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman (and a whole host of others) say that tax cuts do little to stimulate the economy, especially when the economy needs a fast injection of capital, not savings. We need to spend money and create new jobs. Pretty obvious. But, here again the Republicans will disagree. After all, they aren't the type to who like taking advice from informed experts. Let's toss them a bone and throw in some tax cuts. But—here's the kicker—these tax cuts will mostly be aimed towards lower and middle class people, instead of the very rich. That way they'll get spend, not saved. The rest will be spending, and it will be worthwhile spending: money will go directly to states, so that they can stop cutting jobs. We'll renovate 10,000 school buildings and repair the PELL Grant system, which Bush cut to pieces. We'll triple the number of undergraduate and graduate fellowships. We'll spend 360 million on slowing the spread of STDs, enhance the security of 90 major US ports, launch 1,300 wastewater programs, 380 drinking water projects, and 1000 rural and sewer system projects. We'll modernize 75% of government buildings, in the long run saving untold sums of money on heating expenses alone. We can expand the Cobra program, so that the people who lose their jobs will be able to have healthcare for a few more months. We'll start funding rail projects and other forms of mass transportation, to bring us up to speed with the rest of the world. Oh, there's so many more good, positive, common sense uses of this money that I can't even list them all in one paragraph. This is truly the dawn of a bright new day!
[/quote]

Okay: all those figures in that last paragraph were true. Had the original draft of the stimulus bill passed, all those things would have happened. Much more would have happened, too. This was common sense spending on worthwhile stuff, and you'd think that everyone except severe libertarian retards would support it. And they should have, logically. They really, really should have. But, you see, saying that they should have supported it would assume that the parties involved had in the mind the best interest of the American people. They did not.

From day one, the Republican meme has been obstructionism. Obstruct, obstruct, obstruct: at all costs, no matter what the results, you cannot let this legislation get through. Why? Well, if it works then that's the end of the GOP. The exact same logic was used when the GOP shot down Clinton's health care plan. The focus of the party and its advocates was not the best interest of the country. It was the best interest of the Party. If good things happened to the country under a Democratic president, then well the Democrats would benefit right along with the American people. They couldn't allow that to happen. They had to punish the entire world.

Because of this, all of the Republican arguments against the stimulus have been nothing but a sideshow. I am yet to see a single conservative objection to this bill that wasn't either monstrously hypocritical, in light of the reckless spending of the last eight years, or else based on some indefensible ideological fear. Any and all monies going to prevent treat and prevent STDs was made a fuss over, as if the cash were going to buy dildos for middle schoolers. Rep. David Vitters, a man who campaigns on a family values platform but was caught paying hookers who fuck him while he was dressed like a baby (seriously), went on a long rant about how "immoral" it was to give some stimulus money to ACORN. Because, you know, once those black people start voting there's no telling what could happen! Conservative think tanks put up a list of the most "egregious" bits of spending that had been earmarked—a list that included such horrible waste as Midwestern flood relief and the removal of lead paint from urban homes. Countless others cried socialism, or else fell back onto demonstrably untrue homilies about how spending government money on anything but the military is a horrible, wasteful thing to do.

The complaints were illogical and often nonsensical. That doesn't matter, though, since they're not geared towards any real goal aside from making sure that the stimulus doesn't work.

Congressional Democrats haven't been much better. Instead of standing up for an important, worthwhile piece of legislation, they have capitulated for the sake of political expediency. Ben Nelson, who is an idiot as well as a Democrat, gutted nearly all stimulus spending on education, infrastructure, and state projects. He replaced them with tax cuts. For the wealthy.

The result is here summed up by Paul Krugman:

[quote]
What the centrists have wrought

I’m still working on the numbers, but I’ve gotten a fair number of requests for comment on the Senate version of the stimulus.

The short answer: to appease the centrists, a plan that was already too small and too focused on ineffective tax cuts has been made significantly smaller, and even more focused on tax cuts.

According to the CBO’s estimates, we’re facing an output shortfall of almost 14% of GDP over the next two years, or around $2 trillion. Others, such as Goldman Sachs, are even more pessimistic. So the original $800 billion plan was too small, especially because a substantial share consisted of tax cuts that probably would have added little to demand. The plan should have been at least 50% larger.

Now the centrists have shaved off $86 billion in spending — much of it among the most effective and most needed parts of the plan. In particular, aid to state governments, which are in desperate straits, is both fast — because it prevents spending cuts rather than having to start up new projects — and effective, because it would in fact be spent; plus state and local governments are cutting back on essentials, so the social value of this spending would be high. But in the name of mighty centrism, $40 billion of that aid has been cut out.

My first cut says that the changes to the Senate bill will ensure that we have at least 600,000 fewer Americans employed over the next two years.

The real question now is whether Obama will be able to come back for more once it’s clear that the plan is way inadequate. My guess is no. This is really, really bad.
[/quote]

This has been a failure. The only reason it's going to make cloture and get passed is because it has been designed to fail. This will go down in history as a misstep, and it will not unfairly be attributed to Obama. This is Obama's Somalia, in a sense. He's punished for his naivety. His mistake was looking into the eyes of congressional Republicans and convincing himself he was looking at decent human beings, the type with whom compromise and reason would not be futile. They don't care about the American people. They never did and they never will. The Democrats kinda do, a little, but they're much more concerned with scoring political points than with helping anybody, and just like the Republicans they'd club a bag full of puppies to death in exchange for a single consulting contract. Obama is going to have to be harsher with both parties. He's going to have to start being mean, and quick.

This winter was very bad, if I remember correctly. We had a tremendous ice storm on the second or third of January that has not been topped since. The past two winters have been worse overall, but that was the worst single storm. At the time, the winter seemed horrible, easily the worst since I was 7 or 8, when they cancelled school four whole times in one month. It was below zero so long, that summer, that when it finally rose to 10 or 15 me and Jay stood around outside without coats on, it felt so warm. The winter of 2005 was even worse.

Alex spent the last two weeks of Winter Break in Florida. I stayed home, drank too much, and watched Kath and Kim (the Australian version, which differs from the American version in that it is actually funny). I had gotten a bunch of John's Grocery gift certificates for Christmas and I managed to burn through 150 dollars worth of fancy beer in two weeks. This was the first time I had ever lived alone for an extended period. I was on the internet 7 or 8 hours a day, played Halflife for an additional 2-3 hours, and also Madden on the Gamecube. It was the closest I have ever come to death, a sort of purgatory on earth. Numbness has a feeling, you know. Anybody who's ever gotten a tooth drilled will tell you that numbness isn't just the absence of feelings, it's its own feeling. And these two weeks were entirely numb.

Student teaching began. It ran for two days a week, Thursday and Friday, both in the very early morning. I taught English to 6th graders, who were much littler than I remember 6th graders being when I was in middle school, and even though the kids were great all I would do was fantasize about how much I couldn't wait to get home, smoke pot, and watch Degrassi. I worked with the lesser readers, helping them through the horrible stories in their primers. The normal primers didn’t seem any more difficult, and their stories didn't suck nearly as bad. Maybe the people who design those things think that poor readers have trouble comprehending decent plots. I dunno. When the kids had to write their own story, two or three of them wrote one about the Insane Clown Posse. They were easily the most amusing stories in the class, but the teacher got mad at them because they made vague references to drugs.

Alex and I suffered a primal craving for daylight, come late February. We both tend to fall into January/February slumps, or at least I do and then I pass it onto her. Normally I confuse these slumps for general anxiety or depression and treat them with pills and treadmill running. The 2005 slump was the most transparent in its motivation. We were tired, plainly of lightlessness, of not going outside. We wanted brighter hues. So what we did was we started watching a ton of movies that were set in the summer. We'd talk about going on walks. I would daydream about going outside and walking up the hill. (All I have left is the minutia. This is boring to read. I'm sorry. There's a significance here but it's so personal that I don't feel like teasing it out and putting it into words. I want to leave it where it is.)

For Spring Break I went to Kathy's. Nate, Kelsy, and Joe were up there, along with Zach and Andrew. Mom and Kelsy went with Kathy and the boys to a niceish restaurant, the first day the rest of us got there. They had left by the time we arrived. So we smoked a bunch of pot in the garage before going out to eat. It was odd. I scribbled a story on a napkin, something morbid and sad about a monkey being burnt for show. That night we all got hideously drunk and became friends.

Alex and I continued watching lots of movies. Lots of Bergman, especially. This was the first time I saw Persona and it literally gave me the chills; for days afterwards I would think about it and physically shake. We watched Strawdogs and had to turn it off halfway through, drink, and go on a brisk walk before we could finish it.

That Spring semester I had three classes in a row in the same classroom, with Drs. Davis and Swope. I learned a lot about the teaching of writing. My ed department classes were tolerable. Nothing of interest really happened until August, when Kelsy, Nate, and Heather moved into the building next door. It was great. Every day, any time of day, all I had to do was walked 100 feet and Nate would be home, drinking and watching Pauly Shore movies.

In the Fall I decided to forgo the final phase of student teaching and head straight into grad school. (The school where I had been placed for student teaching would have been a 3-hour daily round trip. That I had been living in sin with a common-law wife for 3 years was of no interest to the placement board, apparently. There was no way I could have afforded it.) Strange dichotomy this semester: my only English department course was devoted to James Joyce. I read Ulysses, which is very difficult and took me like 8 weeks to get through. This was my first class of the day. It was a small seminar and we'd have these intense, heady discussions over the novel. Then I'd hoof it to the ed. department building and take classes that went over, I swear to god, the exact same stuff I learned in 7th grade "Quest" class. "Quest" was the class that taught us that drugs were bad and that it wasn't cool to use racial slurs. Once, for a project, one young woman made a poster that said "There are no winners in the racism game, only losers." She got an A. After this class I had a class where we had to read 2 medium-length articles per week and then engage in a debate over the articles. The material was interesting. The professor was a great guy (though most of the students hated him because he had an accent. The same girl who made the Racism Game poster once went on a rant about how when people come to this country they should talk like they are from this country. No joke.) The class was horrible because of my peers and their discussion. It was obvious that few people read the assigned articles and fewer still understood them. In spite of this, everyone clung fervently to their uninformed opinions. Actually, the more uninformed or demonstrably incorrect a person's opinion was the more virulently they seemed to support it. Once a girl said, and I quote, "I might not know who the 50th president was or what century the civil war was fought in, but why does that matter, I'm gonna be a gym teacher," and her comment was met with hoots of appraise. I was the only one who got an A, and I know this because the professor pulled me aside on the last day and told me. (Normally I'd refrain from publically posting a fact like that, but seriously these people were morons and you'd have said the same if you were there.)

Anyhow, Ulysses marked a change in my reading habits. Whereas I'd previously been concerned only with the number of books I had read, and had therefore rarely read anything over 400 pages, I now focused on quality over quantity. Ulysses is one of those books where you convince yourself it's better than it actually is just to force yourself to finish it. It's a monumental achievement, don't get me wrong. Probably the most technically impressive thing I've ever read. There are some parts that are genuinely beautiful. But, man, once you get to Oxen of the Sun it's just a miserable, boring read. Philip Roth went off on it, in Sabbath's Theater, and his criticism was shockingly simple and accurate: the last sections of Ulysses suck to read because they're inaccurate. That is, they don't actually mirror the way people think, even though they're intended to. And they don't. Seriously: if you have a copy around you, flip open Penelope (the last section, if your chapters are unmarked). Again, the writing is technically amazing. But this is not how people think—our thoughts don't tear out of us like dagger slashes. Most of the time our inner voices are silent, our observations are wordless, and when we do put them to words the occasionally have form. Never, ever, I have looked around a room and gone "poster, wall, foot, my foot, my leg, chair, table." No. That not what happens. The Benji chapter of _Sound and the Fury_ is much more accurate in depicting an honest stream of consciousness, in my humble opinion. Observations are made with their context in mind. They make more immediate sense to their thinker than to their reader, because believe it or not most of our thoughts make sense.

But I'm talking out my ass here. I'm neither a Faulkner scholar nor a Joyce scholar. If someone who knew what she was talking about tried to take me to task on this, she could with ease.

I ended the year with a trip to Andrew's and Three Floyds. I read Gravity's Rainbow at the end of the year and then twice more at the beginning of the next year. I drove all the way home on New Year's Eve and Me and Alex hung out with Nate and Zach.

Impecunious. This is one of those gorgeous words that, like King Lear, are much better read than performed. On the paper it is ornamentally twisty, with a lovely dip in the middle. It dignifies poverty, makes it seem like something transient, some kind of noble choice. When said out loud, this word is a mess. I've heard two main variations and both are garbage: im-PECK-u-nos and im-pe-CUIN-ious. I think it's the latter.

Machination. It's very German looking, though it's probably greek, from Machina. This vague Germanic feel causes me to give the word too tangible a definition, and so I think of it as something that applies to factories or car engines more so than to the plots of novels. The most awkward sounding pronunciation I've heard is MAKE-in-a-shun. The two more common variants are MACH-in-a-tion and Mash-chine-a-tion. I assume one is right and one is wrong.

Dickensian. I *know* how to pronounce this one: dick-KEN-see-on. I can hear it clearly in my head. But when I go to say it, it never comes out right. I always end up saying Dickensone, or something equally stupid.

Gauche. I'm about 95% that this is "properly" pronounced with a touch of ersatz French: Go-ch. That works, I guess, but it seems to me to severely undersell the spirit of the word: it makes it sound more like a snooty judgment than a statement of fact. The way I prefer, correctly or incorrectly, is Gow-ch. It's like at a noise a sick cat makes. Nothing pretentious about that.

apercu. This word is correctly written with one of those little tails at the bottom of the C, and I never know how to pronounce those. The front half is clear, but is the back "sew" "sue" or "kue?"

reconnoiter. First of all, no one should ever use this word. "Reconnaissance" is an absolutely fine substitute, and "recon" sounds really cool. Secondly, I'm pretty sure I know how it's pronounced. I just refuse to believe that any word could be so hideous. It doesn't sound like its meaning. Say it: re-con-OIT-er. It's like some archaic medical term, describing the process of putting the pus back into a weeping boil.

Synecdoche. I thought I knew how this was pronounced: sin-ick-doke-ee. That sounded a little basic, no real frills, but it seemed fine. Then that damn Charlie Kaufman movie came out and now I'm confused. The move is called Synecdoche, New York only they pronounce it like Schenectady, New York. This has confused me.

First off, don't bother asking the obvious questions. Your parachute is brown. I know this because I shit all over it. Secondly, I know very well who moved my cheese. It was you. And no, I'm not going to get over it, soldier forth with a happy grin on my face, grateful that even though I am cheeseless I am not yet quite dead. Fuck that. This is your fault. You are going to give me my cheese back, or I will hunt you down. I will take you out behind the dumpster and rape you like you've raped me for the past five years.

You think I’m joking? Seriously? Do you think I have something to live for, seeing as that I work at a fucking Dillard's and my boss, a man who can barely read, who moves his lips while flipping through a the phone book, who once shook his head while closing down a cnn.com article and mumbled "too complicated," just handed me a paperback that he said would help me through "this tough economic period." You think that I want anything else right now than to pull a fire extinguisher off the wall and beat you with until you are just hair, clothes, and smear of purple? That's what I'm thinking about. That's what I am very close to doing.

You are scum. You deserve death and rape. You should have to watch your children die in front of you, in some slow way that they think you can save them, so they keep yelling and their last thought is of what an ass you are, how you just sat there and watched while they died. Of course I want to kill you right now. I want everything you love to be destroyed.

It's not that you're firing me. Oh no. That's a part of it, sure. But people have been fired so long as people have been employed, and usually when they get fired it’s a least a little bit their fault. The decision didn't ultimately—or at least completely—lay in your hands. This is from district, regional, corporate. You guys tier off responsibility, so that even though all of you are always guilty none of you can ever be blamed. This was the shareholders, the economy, those darned fat cats. Everyone but you. Everyone but everyone else, too. No one, really, when you get down to it. And, look, you say, it's just some cheese. You'll find more.

Ahh—that's the sticking point, that's what has drawn this offense past the point of you merely following orders and into the realm of deserved rape. This book you've handed me. This final insult in a long series of indignities that began the day I peed in a cup to prove I was qualified to hang sweaters on racks, continued through the motivational meetings in which I was made to hold hands with my peers and sing the Dillard's cheer, and concludes here, now, with me holding 90 retarded pages of abdication and handwashing. Insulting abdication and handwashing. This wouldn't fool a dull 10-year-old. Then again, a preteen wouldn't have yet had all the dignity beaten out of him by years of work in the retail sector. Unlike my coworkers. They are eating this shit up.

And I will eventually eat this shit. Already, I'm eating it. My rage is on the inside. I will not beat you to death. I will not murder your children. I will merely dream of doing so, and even this small act is enough to set me apart from my coworkers. They consider it a pleasure to have been fired. They see no point in attempting to reclaim a dignity that they have never had and will never be able to grow. This whole time that they've been working here, they've been thankful. Thankful for your mistreatment. Thankful for being yelled at and treated like children. Thankful for the meager pay that has forced them into second and third jobs, thankful for the lack of heath and dental care, thankful for your pep talks, your inane flakes of wisdom, your having made us chant the fact that Dillard's was the third-fastest growing department store in the United States. They are thankful for all of these because they have grown up in a world where having a job—that is, getting a chance to make everyone else rich but ourselves—is a perverse privilege. To think that we deserve better is to think of ourselves as human, and you have taken innumerable steps to make sure that such a thing will never happen. That's what this book is about, really. It's not an insult; it's an assessment. We think of ourselves as mice, trivial little pests that you, the kind overseers, could have poisoned, but instead you were nice enough to leave us be, toss us a few cheese crumbs here and there. And this job is cheese. It's necessary for our survival, yes, but our survival is trivial matter, all unnaturally yellow and full of holes. My coworkers see that so clearly. I will, too.

A dead, dark dungeon of a year in which much was accomplished but very little was done. I read more books in this year than any other year, more than some people read in an entire lifetime and most people read in an entire decade. I won an award in the spring, for things I did the previous year. All I really remember is reading.



My class schedule was light, filled with more-or-less worthless education department courses. You barely had to attend class in order to ace them, let alone do any outside studying or reading. I remember for one of these classes the final project involved using construction paper and crayons. Here I was, supposedly an adult, in a class full of other supposed adults who were just about to become teachers, and the best test of our teaching acumen this university could come up with was a project that was within the grasp of most 2nd graders. It was disgusting. I had no choice but to supplement my education with outside reading. Otherwise I would be just as stupid as my peers.



Truth be told, there was little else we could do aside from read. Alex was working in the mall and spending all of her money in the mall. I had student loans and that was it. I paid all the bills and spent about 50 dollars a week on groceries and gas (my parents helped out, too). I was still under 21, though the gas station down the street would occasionally sell to me, and we didn't have any friends up here in the Cedar Valley. There were acquaintances, but no one whose company I enjoyed enough to consider speaking to them outside of school.



So I read. On Fridays we'd smoke pot and order pizza, and 1-2 nights a week I'd drink a 24 ouncer from the gas station, but that was it. Soberest time since I was 15 or so. Kelsy and Nate and them were planning on moving up for school the next year, and so they stopped up to visit a couple of times. These were huge events, for me and Alex, since we were so starved to see people. Once they brought Jay and Michelle and we all drank heavily, all day, and then went to Olive Garden and there was paper in my soup. It's still one of my favorite days, even though I can't remember most of it.



When people came up, I would still take time to read. It didn't seem rude at the time. After all, I wasn't spending what I then considered a full shift of reading. It was only 2-3 hours a day. That was nothing. When the summer came and I visited my parents for a week or so, I remember feeling horrible because I was only reading 40-50 pages a day.



We had a scare near the end of the semester. I had to leave the house to go take a final exam, but 10 minutes before I had to go I noticed that Benny, my beloved cat, was missing. When I say beloved, I mean beloved. A man goes crazy lying in a bed reading 6-8 hours a day. It was my fault, too. I had brought up a laundry basket and left the door open for a long time and I didn't think to check once I came in. I ran through the apartment screaming for him. The front doors were open. I ran all around the building, yelling his name. I was crying. But I had to leave. I absolutely had to leave. The final I had to take was for a Thursday night class—it was literally the last scheduled final in the entire university. There was no way I could make it up.



So I left. Alex said she'd keep looking. The whole ride to school, I kept thinking about what I was going to have to do. Stay up all night, probably. 5% chance, max, that we'd find him. Call the humane society as soon as we got back. Roam the fields around the complex, calling for him. Then posters, offer a reward. Then nothing, probably. Some redneck would find him, or some fucking sociopathic teenage fuckwad boy, or some fucking Mexican would use him as bait in a dog fight. Hopefully he'd get hit by a car. Hopefully before some worthless person could get a hold of him he would die a decent death.



I got to campus right as Alex was calling my cell phone. She'd found him. He was curled up on our floor, behind the big heavy door right in front of stairs. When she carried him in, he was shivering. Not because he was cold but because he was so scared. There was no composure for me to lose, but if I had any (in general or in this particular moment), I would have lost it, sitting in the parking lot with a cell phone in my hand on a beautiful early summer evening. I went for a smoke and then, without thinking, I dropped the whole pack on the ground. It wasn't a conscious thing. I didn't say "woah I'm so happy right now I think I'll quit smoking." I just sat it down and left it. I've never taken a puff since. Also, I got a perfect score on my final exam, and according to the professor that was the first time that had ever happened.




My 21st birthday was a bit of a wash. Zach and Alex were still under 21 (as were nearly all the rest of my friends), and so they smoked pot before going out. We went to Doughy Joey's and then the bowling alley. It was fun, but I didn't even black out.



I started reviewing good beer about a month after that. In the 4.5 years since I have written reviews for over 1000 beers. I saw my uncle Tom in Madison, where I went to my first brewpub. We all went to see the Cubs beat the Brewers in Milwaukee, which was my first game since 2000. The Cubs traded for Nomar and then fucked everything up. Dusty Baker was, and still is, a monster.



I began to drink more regularly, though not so regularly as to disturb my reading. I didn't skip any pages. I didn't skim. When I started a book, I finished it. Summer ended. In the fall we went to our first Oktoberfest, and it was a blast. That—that was a blackout drunk. I sang with the old people in the barn. On the way home I demanded we stop a few times, so I could continue drinking. I fell asleep on the bed but woke up on the couch. It was wonderful.



The election was horrible. I had caucused and drove old people to the polls on election day. Two dumb old bitches, from two parts of town, at two separate times of day, both told me that they were voting for George Bush because they were hoping the apocalypse would come within their lifetimes and they figured he was the candidate best suited for making that happen. This is when my manipulative disenchantment with democracy began, and so far it's been working out really well for me. It was clear that Kerry had lost around midnight. By that time I had already polished off 10 High Lifes and switched to Gin. A whole bottle. Zach Parsons started an online discussion that prevented me from doing something rash. Instead we blasted our comfort music, the same albums we listened to in high school, Ok Computer, Dark Side, that kind of stuff. Smoked pot. Stayed up until 4 and blew off school the next day. I heard that Kelsy spit on all the Bush-stickered cars she came across the next morning. I took a different tack, which I don't wish to comment on here.



I gained a lot of weight this year, especially after I stopped smoking. I hadn't been going to the gym regularly since school began, and when I cook for myself I tend to use a lot of oil and butter and cheese. It was the last Christmas in our old house on McKinley. Zach and Andrew came up for New Years.